“Pass,” I said. The word came out sounding less like a judge making a ruling and more like someone declining an hors d’oeuvre at a party. Because the beer didn’t smell or taste offensive, it seemed like the right thing to say. If only two panelists voted to fail the beer, it would be considered acceptable and allowed to leave the brewery. If more than two people deemed the beer flawed, it would return to be tasted again the following day. Two fails, and it might wind up washing the drains.
A few panelists included descriptors to their pass/fail announcement. By the end of the panel, I would hear “metallic,” “yeasty with an unpleasant astringency,” “pear-like,” and “hints of isoamyl acetate,” which was listed on the sensory sheet as tasting like bananas and circus peanuts. Doug told me the panelists work as a team. Each person has specific strengths and weaknesses when it comes to perceiving compounds and other attributes of the beer, and everyone on the panel knows the others’ superpowers. That’s why the collective opinion is what matters.
Next up: two versions of Widmer Hefeweizen, the cloudy, German-style wheat beer that made the brewery famous. In the eighties, hefeweizen was a fairly unknown style in the United States (as were most beer styles aside from mass-produced lagers). The Widmer version, which was released in 1986, isn’t authentically German. It’s brewed with an ale yeast that doesn’t produce banana and clove notes, some of the defining characteristics of the style. But Americans didn’t seem to care. During the past thirty years, Widmer Hefeweizen has come to define hefeweizen for American beer drinkers.
The first hefeweizen seemed sharper than the other, which I guessed had something to do with its bitterness levels. In sample two, I thought I tasted a hint of butter, which could have been the result of a flavor compound called diacetyl that is common in beer because it’s a by-product of yeast. Diacetyl feels slick in the mouth and tastes like fake butter or buttered popcorn. Someone once described diacetyl as an overly buttery Chardonnay, a description that made it easier for me to imagine how it might feel in my mouth. In fact, we’re probably all quite familiar with diacetyl: the compound naturally exists in and is purposely added to many dairy products, especially butter and cheese. Yeast can reabsorb diacetyl if given enough time, which is why some brewers practice a “diacetyl rest” during fermentation, when they raise the temperature of the beer so yeast can scrub away any buttery notes.
When it was my turn to weigh in on the two beers, I gave them both a pass. As the other panelists weighed in, no one mentioned butter. I felt relieved I hadn’t said anything. Finally, we reached the last person at the table: Rob Widmer.
“Two. Diacetyl. Fail,” he said emphatically.
I wanted to jump up from my chair and yell, “I knew it!” I’d definitely tasted diacetyl. But it was too late. I’d had my chance. I vowed to do a better job of trusting my own perceptions and voicing them, even in a room of professionals. Even though my fail vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome for the beer, my opinion would have counted for something. If nothing else, speaking the truth about what I tasted would have given me hope that, one day, I could be good at evaluating beer.
Our final beer was a “guest beer” made at another brewery. In tasting panel tradition, the guest beer was served blind, sheathed in a brown paper bag that made it look like a recent purchase from 7-Eleven. After everyone voted, the taste panel administrator would reveal what we’d tasted. The panelists sipped the beer, crinkled their noses and shook their heads, what I imagined was standard procedure for a guest beer, a chance for corporate team building at the expense of another brewery.
“It’s a weird one all the way through,” someone mumbled.
“Artificial citrus and bathroom deodorizer,” Rob Widmer said loudly.
We went around the circle for the last time that day. Despite the negative reaction from the panel, everyone gave the beer a pass, because it didn’t have any major flaws. When the paper bag came off, the beer was a Samuel Adams Summer Ale, a wheat beer brewed with what the label said was “lemon zest and grains of paradise.”
“I bet they didn’t zest many lemons for that one,” Rob Widmer quipped.
We’d never know exactly how they added the lemon flavor, although I entertained a quick fantasy about infiltrating the Boston Beer Company, which makes Samuel Adams beers, to discover the exact recipe and brewing process. We just knew how it tasted. Pass.
That evening, as Oscar zoomed around the kitchen with his Matchbox cars and Tony brushed olive oil on a piece of salmon for the grill, I produced the piece of paper I’d taken from the tasting panel.
“Look,” I said. “Whatever indole is, it tastes like ‘jasmine, floral, fecal, barnyard, mothballs.’ I love a good jasmine fecal beer, don’t you?”
I put the paper under Tony’s line of sight as he sprinkled some salt onto the fish.
“Ooh, cheesy sweatsocks,” he said, reading one description.
“Cheesy sweatsocks,” Oscar squealed. “That’s awful!”
I looked at the paper. Something called isovaleric was responsible for the notes of cheesy sweatsocks. I was thrilled that these were things I needed to know.
I put the piece of paper front and center on the fridge—prime real estate for photos of family and friends, wedding invitations, baby announcements, and Oscar’s artwork—a reminder that my studying could happen incrementally as part of my daily life.
“I like it,” Tony said, glancing at the fridge.
While I’d started to unpack the nuances of how ingredients create flavors, from the crackery-to-roasty spectrum that malt creates to the citrus and pine notes from hops, that wasn’t enough. I also needed to understand what tastes don’t belong in beer.
Inside an air-conditioned meeting room at a beer distributor’s headquarters in Northwest Portland, I stared at yet another clear plastic glass filled with Kona Longboard. With every passing second, the beer was losing aromas, flavors, and carbonation. And that made me nervous. I was taking an off-flavors class from one of my beer heroes, Master Cicerone Nicole Erny. In 2011, at just twenty-eight years old, Nicole became a Master Cicerone, which made her the first woman and youngest person ever to earn the title. At the time, she was the fourth Master Cicerone.
Nicole stood in front of the room wearing black-rimmed glasses, earrings, and a floral tank top, the kind of office casual that signaled she was in charge. All ten people who’d registered for the class had shown up, a first.
“You’re all here to drink yucky beer with me. What’s wrong with you?” she quipped.
Before we got to the beer, Nicole explained how humans perceive taste. We’d probably already figured out that the map of the tongue—the one that shows where we’re supposed to perceive sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—is completely wrong. Just like phrenologists theorized that bumps on the head predicted intelligence, a notion that was widely accepted during the nineteenth century, the tongue map, which has roots in research by the German scientist D. P. Hanig in 1901, is still accepted by some as fact. But it’s a myth: receptors for various tastes are located in distinct cells, but those cells are evenly distributed across the tongue.
Nicole said that researchers are working on creating a better model, and it’s possible they’ll add a few other tastes to the list of what we can perceive: fat, carbonation, and metallic. Those types of discoveries have happened in the past. Since the invention of the tongue map, another flavor has been added: umami, the “fifth” taste, described as meatiness in things like mushrooms and fish sauce. Kikunae Ikeda, a professor of physical chemistry at the Tokyo Imperial University, discovered glutamate as an element in seaweed in 1908, which was the beginning of the scientific exploration of umami. People taste umami through receptors for glutamate. Even after Japanese scientists created the Umami Information Center in 1982 and started holding symposiums around the globe, American and European scientists were slower to concur that umami exists. Although umami isn’t present in most beers, it can show up to a small degree in some stouts and aged b
eers, where it comes off as a soy sauce flavor. Also, since umami is an important part of pairing beer with food, Nicole recommended buying some monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is commonly labeled as “accent seasoning,” and mixing some into a glass of water and drinking it.
Most of the flavors we perceive are aromas, which make the millions of receptor cells in the human nasal cavity essential tools for recognition. Aromas enter our olfaction system either through the nose—orthonasal olfaction—or through the back of the mouth and throat: retronasal olfaction. When it comes to evaluating food and drink, retronasal olfaction counts for a lot. That’s because our warm mouths begin to break down food (or drink), which helps release an array of aroma compounds. Those aroma particles are swept up through the throat into the sinus cavities. Without orthonasal capacities we can be taste-blind. “Try holding your nose while eating pieces of raw apple and potato with your eyes closed,” Nicole said. “It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference.” I remembered doing that experiment during what was probably a junior high school science class. My inability to tell the difference between a fruit and a vegetable seemed magical yet disturbing, something I’d think about as an adult during a horrible few days with a sinus infection, when I lost my sense of smell entirely. Eating became an exploration of textures, which was of little comfort. I was terrified I’d never taste again.
Retronasal olfaction made me think about how beer evaluators and drinkers pride themselves on swallowing, not spitting. Once, I’d written a story about a walking wine tour in Sonoma. The professional wine writers in the group had impressive ways of spitting out wines they were tasting—they spewed with precision while standing, sitting, or walking. Only drink when you’re eating a meal, one wine writer told me. I’d never met a beer person who admonished only drinking at meals. In fact, the only person I’d ever known to spit a beer was myself, while I was pregnant but still needed to taste beers for story research. John Harris told me he feels bitterness in the back of his throat, and because almost all beers contain some element of bitterness, fully tasting them requires swallowing. Also, wine and liquor tasters might prefer to feel the tasting benefit of a full swallow, but the higher alcohol content of those drinks probably rules out that option.
“We screw up aromas by forgetting what they’re called or getting confused about what to name them,” Nicole continued. I can’t count how many times I’ve struggled to find a name for a flavor or a smell, and I know I’m not the only one. But I had a feeling I was clinging too tightly to the idea that there was one correct way to perceive a flavor or aroma. Maybe if I loosened up my ideas of rightness, I’d find more creative ways of approaching beer. If a porter tastes like a grandma’s hat box, why fight it?
“Our parents probably didn’t talk about tastes, so we didn’t learn the differences,” she said. “We’re here to make up for lost time and create a lexicon of what beer flavors are.” If our palates were a box of crayons, she continued, we were about to attempt to go from the box of eight to sixty-four.
We started analyzing the Longboard, first by examining its color and the appearance of its head, which had disappeared into nothing. Then we did a “drive by,” a quick pass of the glass about six inches below our noses, a means of protecting our olfaction systems from any aromas that could temporarily destroy our senses of smell. We were protecting our key instruments. Then we put our hands over the top of the glass and swirled the beer, which warmed the liquid and released its aroma compounds into a confined space. That made it easier to perceive the smell, which Nicole recommended taking in with short sniffs, a more effective way to spark aroma recognition.
“If you’re having a hard time,” she said, “take a longer sniff with your mouth open.”
Once, when I’d interviewed her for a story, Nicole told me she views tasting as an inherent talent—a disheartening idea for those of us who were just learning (she hadn’t repeated that opinion here in the class). What if my hard time meant I wasn’t physically capable of detecting certain things advanced tasters, like Nicole, could perceive?
It was important to give our sense of smell a break, to help create the kind of sensory longevity needed for judging a beer festival or homebrew competition, or taking a Cicerone exam. I read somewhere that you can easily reset your sense of smell by sniffing the back of your own hand, the olfactory equivalent of eating a Saltine cracker, so I tried it. Even though I felt ridiculous smelling my own hand, it worked.
Finally, we tasted the beer. I closed my eyes and let it sit on my tongue for an extra beat, in the hopes that the warm beer would spark some new neural pathways in my brain. Already, I noticed how the beer seemed more complex than it had during the Widmer panel. For comparison’s sake, I held my nostrils closed with my thumb and pointer finger while taking a sip of the beer. And that changed everything. The bitterness I sensed on my tongue seemed muted, as if I wasn’t tasting bitter but feeling it. I also felt a little claustrophobic.
Nicole instructed us to write down six words that described the taste of the beer. I wrote grainy, lemon, cardboard, wheaty, and bitter. I tried to come up with word number six, but nothing seemed right. I kept coming back to the texture of the beer in my mouth, and nearly wrote down “smooth,” but I knew Nicole would bust me on choosing a word that had nothing to do with flavor.
We called out the words we’d written down, while Nicole scribbled them on the white board in front of the class. Each time a word was repeated, she made a tick mark next to it.
“Lager yeast,” someone yelled out.
“What does that taste like?” Nicole fired back, before writing it on the board. “That’s not a flavor. How about something like ‘white wine’ instead?”
“Bitter herbs,” someone yelled. Again, she pushed for more. “Thyme or another kitchen herb?”
Instead of saying “malty” or “grainy,” she said, we should take it a step further with something like “white bread that’s barely been warmed in the toaster.” At that moment I understood the beauty of being overly specific, even if it produced descriptors that sounded slightly ridiculous. I also realized that I’d better start paying more attention to smells and tastes in general. Becoming familiar with the scent of wet moss on a drizzly fall day could add the Jazzberry Jam or Aztec Gold to my tasting crayon box.
Nicole revealed her own list of words for the Longboard: grainy, bitter, lemon, sulphur, and apples. I did a quick count. She and I shared three words, which felt like my own minor victory. And, just like me, she’d failed to write a sixth.
“Corn,” she said, to bring her list to six. “I’m surprised more people didn’t say it.”
A lot of people had written down “lemon,” which came from noble hops, classic European hops that are responsible for many of the signature flavors in pilsners and other lagers. And a lot of people wrote down texture words. The astringency of the beer was derived from tannins, Nicole told us, which caused the grainy, drying feeling on the palate. That could have also been the sharpness some people described, she guessed. Almost everyone said “bitter,” but Nicole pointed out that, on the spectrum of all beers, this wasn’t a bitter beer. “Yet bitterness is a major aspect of this beer,” she said. I let my mind muddle over this idea. On a desert island, the beer was one thing. But placed in the panoply of beers, it was something else entirely.
Next up, the yucky beers. Before we’d arrived, Nicole had spiked samples of the lager with various off-flavors. To get to know them, I covered one glass with my hand and madly swirled the beer inside, as though I was covering someone’s mouth so they couldn’t whisper a secret. Then I released the riddles and swooped them up into my nose. Wham. Corn. Not fresh corn, roasted corn, or corn fritters corn, but creamed corn, the kind that oozes out of a can and splats onto school lunch trays. The chemical compound responsible for the smell was dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which is known for creating flavors of creamed corn, canned black olives, tomato soup, and rotten vegetables. Sometimes, low levels of DMS are considered a
cceptable in pale lagers, where the chemical can come off as pleasantly corny or sweet. This smell was anything but pleasant.
In the next glass, I detected “cotton candy” and wrote that the beer tasted “very sweet, sour.” Wrong. It was my friend diacetyl, the buttery, butterscotch, or fake butter flavor I’d started to think I could identify with my nose plugged. While I had detected diacetyl during the Widmer panel, I struck out today. “Everyone thinks they know what it is,” Nicole said. “It’s the most commonly abused word on BeerAdvocate.” I hadn’t thought about it until then, but it made sense that the crowd-sourced beer review site could be a litmus for beer geeks gone wrong.
As I smelled and sipped all the beers in front of me, I realized that my control beer—the nonspiked beer—tasted like fake butter, big time. I asked my neighbor if I could smell her beers, and indeed, her number two beer smelled like what was sitting in my control beer spot. Somehow I’d mixed up my glasses, but I was thrilled that I’d caught the error. Maybe I was learning something. The third sample tasted like something artificial, maybe plastic or paint. It was acetaldehyde, a chemical that exists in the last step before the yeast creates ethanol, or alcohol, and that lingers when the yeast is separated from the beer prematurely. Nicole made us say the word five times out loud (its pronunciation is not instinctual), and described it as “green Jolly Rancher” and “underripe crabapple.” Acetaldehyde was showing up in beers more frequently as new craft brewers tried to pump out beer too quickly.
My Beer Year Page 4